In the previous post, we discussed several observations, Lisanne Bainbridge made in her much-noticed paper “The ironies of automation”, she published in 1983 and what they mean for the current “white-collar” work automation attempts leveraging LLMs and AI agents based on LLMs, still…

In 1983, Lisanne Bainbridge wrote the much-noticed paper “The ironies of automation”. Being a cognitive psychologist, she discussed some counter-intuitive effects of automation in her paper. She called those effects ironies and paradoxes, providing precise definitions for both terms:

I think a lot about AI-assisted and AI-based coding. The first one is a human who writes code with more or less support of an AI solution. We see it all the time already now. The second one is a human leaving the coding part to a fleet of AI agents. If the human does not even look into the code created but treats it as a black box and looks at the solution only from the outside, i.e., only watches what it is doing, it is usually called vibe coding.

When a company is small and young, work is often done in a seemingly ad hoc fashion. People briefly discuss and then do what appears to be the best solution for the task at hand. As the company is small and most people in the company have a good idea what is important and what is not, this approach tends to work quite well. Sometimes, a wrong decision may be made but in general, this sort of ad hoc approach works quite well.

In the previous post, we completed our analysis of the projection Steve made by looking at some unresolved side effects and questions that would come with such a future.